The present invention relates to a device for surgical cutting of strips of scalp into multiple identical, calibrated hair grafts of small size, comprising a cutting instrument having multiple equidistant parallel blades.
It finds a particularly important but not exclusive application in the field of the surgical treatment of alopecia by grafting the natural hair, and more particularly in the field of micrografting.
The surgical treatment of alopecia by hair transplantation, called the graft technique, consists in transplanting, in one and the same individual, some of the roots of his/her hairs located in the crown (still growing hair) onto the bald regions.
Micrografts of the scalp are, for example, obtained from a rectangular, elongated strip of skin measuring approximately 14 cm in length by 1.5 mm in width and 5 mm in depth, which contains hair roots and has previously been taken, from the occipital crown, using a knife consisting of a handle, at the end of which four to six cutting blades which are parallel, equidistant, and spaced apart by approximately 1.5 mm are mounted. This knife thus makes it possible to obtain 3 to 5 strips measuring approximately 1.5 mm in width and 14 cm in length (first operational step).
Each strip taken is then arranged flat, on a hard work surface and held by a clamp, then recut perpendicularly to its long axis, parallel to the axis of the roots, using a single-blade knife, into several hundreds of micrografts of quadrilateral shape, the size of which varies from 1 to 3 mm in width, and each of which contains one to four roots (second operational step).
The grafts thus obtained are then reimplanted one at a time into small reception orifices arranged in the bald regions (third operational step).
Unfortunately, since the micrografts obtained do not have the same dimension and are not calibrated and homogeneous, given that they are cut by sight and free hand, they do not fit perfectly into the reception orifices and, furthermore, manual cutting of the strips is time-consuming and tedious.